Corrosion Saviors

Our mission is to develop and commercialize corrosion resistant self-healing coatings that can be healed by polymerized healing action, thus fulfilling the goal of a sustainable future.

The challenge

Corrosion remains a major challenge contributing to losses of about 2-5% of the GDP in industrialized nations like the USA, India, and the Netherlands. These costs could be direct economic costs like the material/coating preparation, labor, repair costs, and indirect costs like plant downtime, loss of product, efficiency, contamination, and overdesign. Besides these economic costs, corrosion can contribute to accidents that could lead to loss of human life and the environment, which are tough to estimate and analyze. Oil leakage caused by corrosion can contaminate the drinking water and thus pose serious environmental risks.

The solution

We propose self-healing Corrosion Resistant coatings that could heal by themselves when a crack is induced on the coating's surface, similar to how our wound heal on themselves by the extensive human vascular system. Self-healing corrosion-resistant coatings could increase the coatings' lifetime and possibly act as indicators so as to when to reapply the coating. The coating would consist of Microcapsules of healing agents like Linseed Oil, a drying oil, forming a complex polymer when exposed to air and moisture, resulting in cracks in coatings.